5
Plan infrastructure components
As your team begins to plan infrastructure inclusive of Kubernetes, find out what tech stack you need to
be most successful, both now and in the future. Understanding the reason you want to use Kubernetes
is key to deciding what types of components you’ll need to evaluate. Whether you’re a developer
interested in hassle-free Kubernetes management, a startup needing a faster time to market, or an SMB
that needs dynamic scaling capabilities, managed Kubernetes offerings like DigitalOcean Kubernetes can
help you achieve your goals.
As you architect your infrastructure, consider the following:
Kubernetes installation
Consider if your team will use a
managed or self-hosted
version of Kubernetes. While there are times
when it makes sense to self-host Kubernetes, maintaining self-hosted clusters is time and resource
intensive and requires a level of expertise that many small businesses lack. Managed Kubernetes like
DOKS
bears the burden of managing the control plane, ensuring high availability with the latest security
patches and release updates, providing autoscaling capabilities, and more. Businesses leveraging
Managed Kubernetes often have a faster time to market.
Workload distribution
Do all workloads run on Kubernetes or are they distributed across Kubernetes, VMs, and other compute
platforms? For example, you may want to keep frontend running on Droplets while moving backend jobs
to Kubernetes and adding a load balancer and a managed MongoDB.
An opportunity for multi-cloud
Open source software like Kubernetes allows startups to avoid vendor lock-in by facilitating migrating
projects to other clouds or spreading workloads across multiple clouds, while Infrastructure as Code
(IaC) tools like
Terraform
easily provision environments. With Kubernetes, teams can pick up their whole
infrastructure and run it the same way in different environments, easily moving networking, applications,
databases, and even things like secrets. Using Kubernetes, developers can mix and match services from
different providers to best fit their solution.
Kubernetes provides a consistently proven system across clouds that can lessen the technical debt
of multi-cloud environments. If you include Infrastructure as Code (IaC), tools like Terraform, Ansible,
Pulumi, and many more have further simplified provisioning across clouds, all of which can be fully
automated through DevOps workflows.
“DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes has totally changed the way I think about
deploying applications. In an ad push, we’d have to know ahead of time to spin up
servers and it could take a whole afternoon. Now, I can click a button and it’s done.”
Joshua Verdehem, Co-Founder, Loot.tv